careful investments in companies that you think are doing the right thing and you never know when a carl icahn is going to show up and upset the apple cart and cause a corporation to get that one time share price bump up. but in the long run, it is hard to make your long-term returns. if you have an questions about whether that is happening, i have a new piece of macro economic evidence for you. number one, our public corporations are disappearing. the number of public companies listed on the u.s. exchanges has declined by more than 40% in the last 15 years. if it were a species, we would call it in danger. -- endangered. number two, the life span of a fortune 500 company was about 75 years in the 1920's. it is down to 15 years today. so if you have any doubt that short-termism is harming our corporations, that should be some evidence you think about. you might wonder if there is more going on than you have realized. what are we to do? the good news is, i do see this problem is very fixable, or at least improveable. we know what we need to do. of the first thing we need to do is try to r